Like a phoenix, Alamo Square has arisen

Houses that were abandoned now worth millions

A row of homes along Fulton Street between Steiner and Fillmore Steets, on the edge of Alamo Square San Francisco, Calif., on Tuesday Nov. 11, 2008.

A row of homes along Fulton Street between Steiner and Fillmore Steets, on the edge of Alamo Square San Francisco, Calif., on Tuesday Nov. 11, 2008.

Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

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A row of homes along Fulton Street between Steiner and Fillmore Steets, on the edge of Alamo Square San Francisco, Calif., on Tuesday Nov. 11, 2008.

A row of homes along Fulton Street between Steiner and Fillmore Steets, on the edge of Alamo Square San Francisco, Calif., on Tuesday Nov. 11, 2008.

Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

Like a phoenix, Alamo Square has arisen

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In Haight-Ashbury, it was the Summer of Love - an exuberant celebration of peace and love, psychedelic drugs, music and long hair.

Ten blocks away in Alamo Square, the summer of 1967 was more like the Winter of Discontent.

The once posh neighborhood - the czar of Russia's consulate was there - surrounding a grassy, 12.7-acre tree-studded knoll in the Western Addition had steadily deteriorated since World War II. Many of its elegant homes - a diverse mix of architectural styles dating back to the 1870s - had been turned into boardinghouses, rest homes, halfway houses. Others stood abandoned, paint and plaster peeling, vacant windows looking out on a park that had become a den of thieves.

Marvin Edwards, then-president of the Alamo Square Neighborhood Association, told police the park had become a staging area for a reign of terror that included burglaries, robberies, muggings and drug dealing. Much of the crime, it was thought, emanated from a nearby pair of high-rise housing projects. After two slayings and more complaints, the city installed new lighting in the park.

Someone should have told Edwards - who now lives in the Mission District - not to worry: Alamo Square would rise again. According to a recent article in Forbes magazine, houses in the Alamo Square neighborhood - bounded north by Golden Gate Avenue, south by Fell Street and east and west by Divisadero and Laguna streets - have, since 1990, the highest rate of appreciation (522 percent) in the city.

Walking in the park is no longer a death wish. Tourists gather there to pose in front of a row of colorful Victorians on Steiner Street, called the "Painted Ladies," with the city skyline as a backdrop. Neighbors, many of them families, swap gossip in the dog park. Kids play in the new playground.

Many of the Victorian and Edwardian-era houses have been resurrected in glorious detail. Others are undergoing restoration. Alamo Square is, as one longtime resident put it, a highly desirable neighborhood with million-dollar homes where home buyers - looking for spacious, stylish digs with a past - get more bang for the buck.

And while San Francisco isn't exactly short of desirable neighborhoods with million-dollar homes, this one, say those who live there, has something most others haven't - a real sense of community.

Alamo Square's revival didn't happen overnight.

"It was a gradual process," says Joe Pecora, a resident who has called Alamo Square home for nearly 30 years. "It's changed continuously since I moved here."

Even in the depths of its disrepair, Alamo Square had a couple of things going for it: Centrally located, its big houses - with architecture evoking the respectability and charm of 19th century England - were relatively cheap. In the late '60s, a four-story, six-bedroom, 6,000-square-foot Victorian could be had for $50,000. Middle-class couples, black, white and gay, began buying them and fixing them up.

Pecora, now 71, moved to Alamo Square in 1979. He walked through the front door of a tired, worn-out Queen Anne way past her prime and fell in love. A social worker who had served a three-year stint as a diplomatic courier with the State Department, Pecora didn't know anything about Victorian architecture. He didn't know anything about restoration. He just knew that he had to have her.

Pecora brought his friends to see the four-story, 16-room, 4,000-square-foot house. They saw the dicey neighborhood, the molding falling off the exterior, the saggy stairs that led to a badly abused interior. They did what most friends do when introduced to a pal's dubious new flame - they kept their mouths shut. "They later told me how appalled they had been," Pecora says. "I think they thought I had lost my mind."

The home, built in 1893, was owned by a family from Texas. They were Buddhists who wore saffron robes and practiced acupuncture in the dining room, Pecora says. They had been firebombed at their previous home, the house next door.

Pecora paid them $150,000, which he admits was probably too much at the time, and set about restoring the house. With only his modest social worker's salary to fund the project, he planned to restore one room at a time, one room a year.

"I still haven't tackled the kitchen," he says.

Obsessed with the joy of the hunt, Pecora scoured estate and garage sales and auctions for furnishings. Seated at a desk in his parlor, he points to a pair of matching chandeliers that he picked up for a song at a garage sale some years back.

Some strange things happened along the way. While working at his desk one day, he heard a woman from outside say, "I used to live here." Pecora went outside, introduced himself and invited her in. During the course of the conversation he discovered that the woman - who had lived in the home with her family during the '30s - was in a photograph he had found one day while working on the parlor's fireplace mantel.

Other things happened as well. Pecora joined the Victorian Alliance, a group devoted to the preservation and restoration of Victorian homes in San Francisco. He joined the Alamo Square Neighborhood Association. Eventually, he became editor of the association's newsletter and started writing historical articles about individual homes in the neighborhood.

Upon receiving the history of their home - which Pecora laboriously researched through archives and interviews with previous owners - the homeowners would host a party for the neighborhood. In this way, residents got to know one another.

"This is a real community," Pecora says. "How many other neighborhoods can you say that about?"

"You have a very active neighborhood here," Gary Beyrouti agrees. "Overall, it's a good neighborhood with people who care."

A broker with Sotheby's International Realty, Beyrouti and his partner, Daryl Spreiter, have spent the last five years restoring a Queen Anne on Fulton Street they bought for $960,000 in 2003. Although the home was a wreck inside, Beyrouti says, the architectural details were intact. Now that it has been restored to its original splendor, they are considering putting the 4,200-square-foot house, built in 1895, on the market for around $3 million.

Beyrouti says he has noticed several other homes in the neighborhood being renovated as well. Home buyers seeking older, larger homes, he says, would do well to check out what Alamo Square has to offer. A 7,000-square-foot Queen Anne in Pacific Heights worth anywhere from $7 million to $9 million, Beyrouti says, might go for $5 million in Alamo Square.

John Conomos has already taken that advice. He and his wife, Amanda, their two children and two dogs moved into their 1902 Colonial Revival-style home on Fulton Street. Both the six-bedroom main house, which is about 6,600 square feet, and a two-story carriage house in back have undergone extensive renovation. Conomos said the house, which had been converted into a rest home called "El Reposo," looked like "a cross between a bowling alley and a church."

Both Conomos, a developer and general contractor, and his wife, who works as design coordinator on her husband's projects, have always been fond of older homes. When they got together for their first date, he owned a 1911 Edwardian in the Upper Haight, while she had an 1895 Victorian row house in Cow Hollow.

"We had brunch," Conomos says, "and then spent the rest of the time walking through our neighborhoods looking at the homes."

Conomos says Pecora found a photo, taken in 1924, of their house in Alamo Square, which helped them with the restoration. "My wife and I felt that we wanted to be true to what the original architect and builder intended," he said. "We wanted to bring the house back to life and honor that and raise our children."

Maryam Monsef and her husband, Alan Sagatelyan, looked for an older home in several San Francisco neighborhoods before finally settling on a 1903 Edwardian on Grove Street.

The 4,800-square-foot house, which also has a carriage house in back, had been converted into apartments. The couple have spent the past two years restoring it into a single-family home for themselves and their three children. They hope to move in soon.

"One thing that grabbed us about Alamo Square was the neighborhood," Monsef says. "It still has that edgy side to it, but you still have families walking around. I like that - it's part of being in San Francisco. In Pacific Heights, you don't see that diversity."